I'm on a per diem and in a hotel room right now, so cooking is a no-go. Prices are shooting up across the board, and not in tiny increments. A burrito for lunch was $8, now it's $15. Lot of tape on the menus on food trucks round here. Along those lines, I ordered a sandwich at Jersey Mikes, which must be so named because it tasted like wringing out Mike's Jersey after a game on to a sandwich. Anyway, the girl doing the sandwich assembly was new. Cost of the sandwich: $20.10, about $3 of which was a tip (fuck you, it's to-go food). I ordered groceries via 2 hour pick up on Target....and the two-hour window turned into 28 hours, with no notification. I asked, and the manager guy was like, it's a staffing issue, and corporate controls the emails, I can't send you anything other than it's ready to pick up. SO not only is it all more expensive, it's somehow also shittier. We knew there would be some inflation because of all the pandemic spending, and I think the name of the game is to beat the global average, in our case by a LOT because of our status as reserve currency. The issue is asset inflation is harder to scale down, because people tend to want to keep the things they own inflated.
A few months before the pandemic started my wife and I also decided to stop eating out. It was too expensive. Especially as my kids started getting older and could eat more. At first it was hard work. Now it just kind of works. Every Sunday morning we put together a menu. A properly thought out menu is the key to making this work. Put food on it you actually want to eat. We look at recipes together. The kids also get to pick a meal. They almost exclusively choose pizza or breakfast for dinner. And we make it every time. That way they also don’t get frustrated by not eating out. We go to the grocery store once a week to get things we need for the menu. About 80% of our veggies come from the garden. I’ve got the cost down to around $200 a week. It could go a lot lower but we try to shy away from cheap carbs (potatoes, flour, rice). Now we eat out 1-2x a month. It’s always a celebration or experience and never one born from pure boredom and laziness.
This is a great guide on how to mealplan with a family with kids. I'll be trying to move in this direction once we can resume normal operations. I tend to make big meals with lots of leftovers but have discovered that no one else likes leftovers much. Hubs will eat certain things until they are gone, like enchiladas, but most everything else is one day of leftovers and he's over it. I just need to accept it. Do you find a lot of new ideas to try or kind of rotate the same foods over the month? I have been in a creative rut for awhile and finding food to make that is new and palatable to everyone can be a challenge.
I do this for "special" meals that I know will be frozen in soup containers for later one-off meals, like stews, chili, even egg noodle stew type stuff. For instance, I made some killer osso buco about a month ago. Doing it right, it takes HOURS. So I did up about 8 meals of them at once, and 6 of them went into vacuum packed sous vide bags for later consumption. All I have to do is throw it back in the sous vide for a bit and it's a fantastic dinner with minimal work. Especially when I'm working long days, like this week... I don't know when I'm going to be done, and don't have time to cook... I throw the pack in the sous vide in the afternoon when I'm grabbing a coffee, and when it's time to eat it's as easy as pulling it out of the sous vide, cutting the top of the pouch off, and dumping it onto a plate. Crazy tasty, super easy.
I don't know why freezing stuff intimidates me. I'm more likely to freeze ingredients rather than meals. I'm afraid the consistency will be "wrong," but the last time I froze a prepared meal it did really well so I need to be better about this. I do have a vacuum sealer too, I just don't think to use it. Never conceived of using a sous vide in this manner. I bet that helps thaw and warm things perfectly without mushy or bad areas.
We tend to do a batch of food that lasts for 3-4 days, but I can find some fatigue in leftovers, too. Something that helps is batching foods that easily freeze (especially anything with a lot of liquid - chili, stew, gumbo, soup, etc.), so that you can do one night of leftovers and stick the rest in the freezer. Alternatively, sometimes we'll interrupt the leftovers with doing a single meal - make a pizza, get tacos out, something like that. My partner will eat the same leftovers for a week straight and she won't flinch, but sticking a different meal in the middle really helps me to not get sick of it.
https://a.co/d/iuouIno Meals were getting stale so I made it my New Years resolution to try at least two new recipes a month. I think I average 4. The best way I’ve found to accomplish this is physical cookbooks. You have pictures. You have ingredients. You don’t have blog spam or over load of 14 million recipe to choose from. Figure out a few chefs that you trust and get some of their books. I wanted to learn to cook Americanized Chinese. Because I really missed saucy salty sweet Chinese take out. I got a copy of Kenji’s new book The Wok. I try to cook at least two dishes a month from it that I haven’t made yet. I am also cooking through George motz’s Great American Burger Book. It’s about regional cheese burgers. Because not all recipes need to be complex. As mentioned above the sousvide is great tool because you can cook meat all day without watching it, then just sear it right before you eat. The biggest trap we currently run into is days when we don’t have much time. On Wednesday’s my kids have t-ball practice after school. We cook their dinner on Tuesday night so that it just needs to be heated up on Wednesday. And they can eat a real meal, really fast. We won’t be tempted to stop at McDonald’s because we don’t have time. A microwaved meal is almost always better than fast food. plan plan plan.
You got a recipe for the Osso buco? I have my deer shanks frozen right now and need a good recipe. My mom’s friend food preps by cooking 3-4 weekly portioned meals at once . Freezes it all and then mixes and matches different meals for a month. I have zero issues with left overs meal planning. I’ve gotten done to cooking on huge meal for the week and splitting it up between lunch and dinner. 14 ish meals of the same thing.
Boneless skinless chicken thighs come in packs of 6. And thin or thick bone-in pork chops come in packs of 4. What I usually do is get the chicken marinating on Sunday so it’s ready to grill on Monday. Those can either be lunches or dinners(or both). I’ll stock a handful of veggies for the week. By Wednesday, I will grill the pork chops and eat that night and the next day. I typically have enough of that to last through Friday. Sometimes, I will make a lentil soup that easily sits in the fridge all week and can serve as either lunch or dinner as well. Yes, it can get a little boring but that’s just how we are doing it right now to help save some money and not eat shitty stuff.
Avoiding this attitude has been very important to our success. Figure out what you want to eat. Figure out recipes. Don’t just eat whatever because. You don’t want to resent your choices. Find recipes you like. Figure out how to make them.
We're starting to look ahead at Christmas and I'm already thinking that we may scale things back a bit. We'll have to talk to our parents and make sure they're all on board and maybe just focus on the "kids" who are mostly in their teens now. Shit is getting more expensive despite the talking heads saying it's getting better. I noticed stuff in the grocery store jumped up .20 since a week or two ago. I just can't see the sense in going into a bunch of credit card debt for one day when just living a normal life the other 364 is getting more expensive. As for groceries, here it's eased up a little since it's just the wife and I. I make out a menu for 10-14 days out, some stuff easy to make and others a little more involved. I do the shopping, and I have an eye for bargains. The other day I picked up a bunch of meat marked down for clearance with an expiration date of the following day. Once it's in the freezer, that date doesn't mean much.
I try to shop deals too. I use the Safeway app a lot and am usually able to get discounts on milk and cheese, seasonal produce, plus other random items. Another grocery store in town has random sales on refrigerated items, like .50 crescent rolls, .50 for 32oz tubs of yogurt. Walmart is on average cheaper but sale items are rare, so I fill in the gaps at the end with them.
Yeah I have a dozen or so recipes I love and know like the back of my hand. One reason I don’t get bored of my meals is they are fancy gourmet delicious.
You can also freeze things that aren't totally finished. For example I don't freeze a full pasta dish, but rather freeze the sauce, and then cook the pasta fresh each time I eat some. Or freeze jambalaya without rice, and then add/cook the rice on reheat. Lets you batch out a bunch of the work and preserve the perishables, without having to subject the most delicate parts to mushification.
Not really a recipe...really, I just did what I normally do with this type of cut. And these were bison shanks on sale from Costco... damn tasty. Picked up a couple of 4-packs. Let them come up to room temp, then seared each side well in olive oil. This is the only grill/searing time they will get, so let them REALLY sear. Set them aside. Diced up an onion, some carrots, some celery and used it and some red wine to deglaze the pan (I used a stick, or non-non-stick pan, to ensure burnt pieces aka flavour were stuck to it). Added some garlic (4-5 cloves smashed then chopped). Added a big can of chopped tomatoes. Added a bit of nice balsamic vinegar and zest from a lemon. Some salt and lots of black pepper. (I love black pepper). Added a bunch of beef broth, the rest of the bottle of red wine (minus a glass for me), and then let it all reduce down to a nice, thick sauce. Took about an hour or so. When it was all done, I pulled it out and let it all cool. From there I did up the freezer/sous-vide vacuum bags, putting 1 shank and a portion of sauce in each. I then cooked all of them in the sous vide for about 12 hours at 134°F. At that point, they are ready to eat. I had one then, but the rest were put in the freezer for later. Those frozen ones just needed to be warmed up (I use the sous vide at the same 134 for that), and then poured over mashed potatoes or rice or served with bread and you're good to go. Super fucking tasty.
If you have a Sam's Club nearby, you can get some killer deals there. For example, a single pack of 8 Ballpark Franks is 4.50 in the grocery store. But at Sam's, you can get a 24 pack for less than $7.00. Then you go home, split them up into 3 packs and freeze them. There's a lot of different instances where we buy in a bigger quantity and save.